SartorissInMGM

This eighth story about the Sartoris family during the Civil War, written half a dozen years after the others were collected into The Unvanquished, is like the rest narrated by Bayard. His father, Colonel John, appears several times, but the Sartoris men are both overshadowed by John's mother-in-law, Rosa, who not only runs the plantation while John at war, but gives orders to a Confederate General - though the field on which she fights is marital rather than martial. John and Bayard are the most frequently recurring characters in the fictions (the father appears or is metioned in 22 texts; his son in 18). Rosa appears or is mentioned in 10. But this story also mentions John's mother and his first wife, who never appear in the fictions directly and are only mentioned (though never named) in 3 and 4, respectively. The references to them here don't add any new facts about them as people, or about their role in the family; instead, the story's use of them can be called artifactual - John's "Carolina" mother is represented by a medallion (670) and his wife (Bayard's "Mother," 698) by the wedding dress that her mother and she each wore before it is worn a third time by a cousin at the story's end. The story is both a romance, and a send-up of romances with "ladies looking out windows and playing on something [like dulcimers] while somebody else was off somewhere fighting" (695), and the comedy depends upon juxtaposing war with the genteel repression of life's grittier elements, like 'backhouses' - i.e. privies. In this context, the role of the Sartoris family is basically to provide the setting.